Dozens of photos and videos posted to Twitter showed what appeared to be twisters touching to the ground. In some, the asphalt looked to have been ripped from the road along a two-lane highway near Pierson, Man., and there were reports of grain bins being found on rural roads.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage, but power lines were brought down and some farm buildings appear to have been hit.

In one alert, Environment Canada said the tornado had become rainwrapped and hard to see, calling that “a dangerous and potentially life-threatening situation.”

Television programming in Manitoba was regularly interrupted by emergency alerts warning of tornadoes moving toward small communities and at one point, toward the town of Virden, which has a population of about 3,000.

A town Twitter feed reported that local RCMP were pulling vehicles off the road and instructing drivers to take shelter, and others reported officers were telling people inside at least one convenience store to stay put until the storm passed.

“Virden radar shows it is almost here,” Mayor Jeff McConnell tweeted at one point. “Take cover now please! I want to see you in the morning.”

Power was knocked out in the town for a time and near midnight, Environment Canada confirmed that a tornado had hit an area northeast of the community.

Regina, meanwhile was deluged with 73 millimetres of rain, which caused localized flash flooding in some streets.

OTTAWA — The commissioner of elections has cleared the federal NDP of any wrongdoing related to mass mailings sent into four ridings in the midst of byelections in 2013.

In a letter to NDP national director Anne McGrath, Yves Cote says he’s concluded no offence was committed.

Cote says one of the mailings, to voters in the Manitoba riding of Provencher, was sent outside the official byelection campaign period.

Two others, to voters in Toronto Centre and the Montreal riding of Bourassa, were sent out two days before the byelections were called and could not be stopped, despite what Cote says were “genuine efforts” by the NDP to recall them.

Other mass mailings to residents of Bourassa and the Manitoba riding of Brandon-Souris were sent within the official campaign period and Cote says they were properly reported as campaign expenses by the NDP.
Cote says his office did not pursue complaints from other parties that the NDP used free parliamentary mailing privileges to distribute the partisan missives — a matter that is not regulated by the Elections Act.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/ndp-cleared-of-wrongdoing-related-to-byelections-mass-mailings-elections-commissioner-says/feed0stdCOTEManitoba to apologize to aboriginals taken from parents and adopted into white families in ’60s Scoop’http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-to-apologize-to-aboriginals-taken-from-parents-and-adopted-into-white-families-in-60s-scoop
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-to-apologize-to-aboriginals-taken-from-parents-and-adopted-into-white-families-in-60s-scoop#commentsFri, 12 Jun 2015 14:25:35 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=795906

WINNIPEG — Manitoba is set to apologize to aboriginals who were taken from their parents decades ago and adopted into non-aboriginal families.

The apology, thought to be the first by a Canadian province, is directed at individuals from the so-called “60s Scoop,” which many see as an extension of Indian residential schools policy.

Premier Greg Selinger said the apology, expected next week in the legislature, will acknowledge damage done to those taken from their homes and their culture. Manitoba was one of the provinces most affected, so it is appropriate that it be among the first to apologize, he said.

“It’s an acknowledgment that they did lose contact with their families, their language, their culture,” Selinger told The Canadian Press. “That was an important loss in their life and it needs to be acknowledged. It’s part of the healing process.”

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Adoptees have been calling for a federal apology and many want compensation for their experience, which they say was as traumatic as that suffered by residential school survivors.

Selinger said he hopes the apology prompts the federal government to say it’s sorry.

“These policies were initiated at the federal level all across the country. We’re acknowledging the harms done in Manitoba and the need for healing in Manitoba. We’d like to see the federal government address it on a pan-Canadian level as well.”

From the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their homes by child-welfare services and placed with non-aboriginal families, some in the United States.

Manitoba has organized gatherings of adoptees to share their stories and helped bring the idea of compensation, counselling and repatriation to premiers last year.

Residential school survivors have had a formal apology from Ottawa and were able to speak at hearings held by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which released its summary final report last week. But ’60s Scoop adoptees haven’t been formally recognized.

Coleen Rajotte was taken from her Cree community in Saskatchewan when she was three months old and raised by a Manitoba family. The apology means a lot, but it’s just the beginning, she said.

Adoptees deserve a national commission of their own, Rajotte said. Some adoptees have never made it home and can’t be repatriated because they can’t prove they are Canadian.

“A huge effort has to be made to reach out and find all the kids who haven’t come back yet,” said Rajotte, who has spoken before the United Nations.

David Chartrand was taken from his Manitoba family when he was five and moved to Minnesota, where he said he was placed with a family that treated him like a “slave” and a “punching bag.”

It brings recognition that there was an injustice done to us. I was hoping this would be the federal government that would do this

When he returned to his home community of Camperville, Man., in his 20s, he said he had nothing. An apology is the least a government can do for those who feel like “forgotten people,” he suggested.

“It brings recognition that there was an injustice done to us. I was hoping this would be the federal government that would do this.”

Chartrand, like many other adoptees, is seeking justice through a class-action lawsuit filed in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. Another class-action lawsuit in Ontario is still making its way through the courts.

“I’ll see them in court,” Chartrand said. “If the Queen herself was to say, ’I’m sorry for what they did to you,’ I would accept that.”

Tony Merchant, a Regina lawyer representing adoptees including Chartrand, said the government’s apology is important. But if Manitoba were serious about reconciliation, it could follow the apology with a compensation package, he said.

“The first step always is to recognize wrong and then consider what ought to be done.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-to-apologize-to-aboriginals-taken-from-parents-and-adopted-into-white-families-in-60s-scoop/feed0stdGreg SelingerDeath of 11-year-old girl Teresa Robinson on Manitoba First Nation now being treated as a homicidehttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/death-of-11-year-old-girl-teresa-robinson-on-manitoba-first-nation-now-being-treated-as-a-homicide
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WINNIPEG — Manitoba RCMP say they are treating the death of an 11-year-old girl on a northern reserve as a homicide.

Teresa Robinson’s remains were found on the Garden Hill First Nation on Monday, several days after she had left a birthday party.

Residents had believed she was mauled by a bear.

RCMP say that while the remains were disturbed by animals, there is no evidence animals caused the girl’s death.

They say foul play is suspected but would not release how the girl died.

If Rachel Notley, leader of the Alberta NDP, should somehow emerge from next week’s election as premier, Thomas Mulcair will have to be one happy man.

After months trailing both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau in voter support, he’ll finally have something positive to seize on.

See, If Alberta … Alberta! … is willing to take a flyer on an NDP government, why not the rest of Canada? No place has been more historically cautious about change than Canada’s most prosperous province – 44 straight years of Tory rule, for cripe sake – yet so badly have the Progressive Conservatives mucked up the books that Albertans might actually be willing to put their faith in the NDP.

Mulcair couldn’t be blamed if he jumped right on the first jet to Edmonton, the better to pose with the new NDP premier. The only problem is, to get there he’d have to get past Manitoba. Where the NDP has been in power for four straight mandates, and looks unlikely to make it five.

Selinger mantains it’s not his government’s fault if it can’t stick to its forecasts.

The problem is Greg Selinger, the Manitoba premier. Selinger has a difficulty with promises. He makes them, then he breaks them. Then he shrugs it off. A promise? Big deal. You mean you thought I’d keep it?

During the 2011 election campaign, Selinger promised not to raise the sales tax. Then, once back in office, he raised it. Manitobans were so upset that the premier’s cabinet rebelled against him and tried to oust him from office. Five of his top appointees stepped down, and Selinger was forced into the humbling position of entering a leadership contest for the job he already held. He managed to hang on – barely – winning just over 50% of party delegates on the second ballot. Hardly a rousing endorsement of a man who had already been premier for five years.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John WoodsManitoba's legislature: NDP is split down the middle.

Once back in office, Selinger vowed renewal. Against all the evidence, he declared the party was stronger than ever, despite being split down the middle. “When you can get results for the people of Manitoba, you always earn the chance of [serving them again],” he proclaimed.

Less than two months later, however, Selinger is back shrugging off promises. This time it’s his promise to balance the books by 2016, when the next election is due. Despite the fact Manitoba has a balanced budget law, the pledge was never meant to be taken as read, he said Tuesday.

“It was in law. It was a target. But we always said that we wouldn’t do it at the sacrifice of essential services for Manitobans, and we wouldn’t lose our focus on growing the economy and making sure that people have opportunities to work.”

So, in Manitoba, laws are just “targets.” Well, that’s novel. This isn’t the first time Selinger’s government has ignored its own budget pledge: it previously vowed the books would be balanced by 2014, but amended the law so it could keep running deficits, which it has been doing since 2009. He said Monday he hopes to avoid raising taxes when the provincial budget is released on Thursday, but won’t rule it out. “If we can keep growing the economy, we think there’s good prospects to do that,” he said. “But economic forecasts have been brought down.”

To defend his serial pledge-breaking he makes an odd argument. On the one hand he claims Manitoba has one of the strongest economies in the country. On the other, he says it can’t pay its bills without borrowing money or raising taxes. This week he suggested another deficit would in fact be a sign of NDP “prudence.”

“We’re taking a balanced approach where we don’t cut core services to people, where we provide opportunities for young people to get good jobs, and we also act with fiscal prudence in terms of dealing with the deficit and we will continue to do that in this budget,” he said.

“The premier shows a shocking lack of understanding of the economic realities that Manitoba must deal with.”

Selinger mantains it’s not his government’s fault if it can’t stick to its forecasts. It’s all the fault of Ottawa, which doesn’t send it enough money, and the falling price of oil.

“Have you noticed the oil prices in the last few months?” he said. “There’s been pretty dramatic changes all across the country in what the forecast for the economy is.”

That notion strikes opposition leader Brian Pallister as particularly egregious. He noted that the Conference Board of Canada forecast that lower oil prices would be good for Manitoba, leading to an increase in manufacturing.

“The premier shows a shocking lack of understanding of the economic realities that Manitoba must deal with,” Pallister said.

Yeah, but so what? Just because the premier said oil was to blame, doesn’t mean he meant oil was to blame. It was just a target, you see. Something to say for the microphone. Nobody expects a premier to mean what he says. Not in Greg Selinger’s world, anyway. As the only NDP government in Canada, Selinger’s isn’t setting a great example. If Thomas Mulcair does have a reason to head to Edmonton next week, he might want to skip over Manitoba.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/kelly-mcparland-manitoba-premier-starts-breaking-promises-even-before-the-budget/feed0stdSelingerfbTHE CANADIAN PRESS/John WoodsWinnipeg girl, 15, who was sexually attacked while in government care removed from life supporthttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/winnipeg-girl-15-who-was-sexually-attacked-while-in-government-care-removed-from-life-support
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/winnipeg-girl-15-who-was-sexually-attacked-while-in-government-care-removed-from-life-support#commentsThu, 16 Apr 2015 23:41:39 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=742733

Manitoba is close to declaring victory in its bid to remove crown wards from hotels that have served as their home of last resort, even as the badly beaten girl who inspired the policy change appeared near death Thursday.

The family of the 15-year-old aboriginal teenager, who was beaten and left on a parking lot ramp in downtown Winnipeg in the early hours of April 1, removed her from life support after two weeks spent in an induced coma. The young woman — originally from a reserve in northern Manitoba — had been athletic, a violinist and the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, her mother told the Winnipeg Free Press.

“She’s a very good kid and somebody seriously hurt her,” she said. Police have charged a 15-year-old male who was also a crown ward living in a hotel and knew the young woman. He faces charges of aggravated assault and sexual assault.

On Thursday, the Manitoba government moved its only crown ward living in a hotel to a “more appropriate placement,” but that child will not be the last as the province expedites its vow to end the practice of using hotels as emergency placement for wards in the child welfare system.

“We are carefully monitoring the situation with the child in the hospital and we’re hoping for the best, obviously,” said Rachel Morgan, government spokesperson for Minister of Family Services Kerri Irvin-Ross.

Irvin-Ross made an emotional vow the day after this young woman’s beating to speed up the phase-out of hotels as a means of lodging for children in Child and Family Services care. These hotels — particularly in downtown Winnipeg — have been known to be dangerous, and the government offers little supervision and support for children living there.

That practice, Irvin-Ross told reporters, will end by June 1. The government already had pledged to stop using hotels as way stations for young people in care after the death of Tina Fontaine last summer. The 15-year-old, who lived in the Best Western Charterhouse Hotel before she disappeared, was found wrapped in plastic on the banks of the Red River.

The goal to stop using hotels to house children in emergency situations may be very close to being met. The government has been monitoring the number of times children have lodged in hotels and have been at “zero several times in the past few weeks,” Morgan said. Same goes for the full Easter weekend. But many children checked into hotels on the Tuesday following Easter.

“We might have children in hotels again tomorrow,” she said. “The point is, we are moving in the direction of ending it altogether and the minister has promised there will be no child placed in emergencies in hotels by June 1.”

John Woods/The Canadian PressFamily Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross has promised the Manitoba government will stop housing foster children in hotels by June 1.

The government promised to create 71 emergency foster home spaces and a secure residential care unit to work with girls aged 12-17 with complex needs.

While the province’s indigenous leadership is glad to see this practice end, there is a lot of work to be done to fix a child welfare system in which aboriginal children are vastly over-represented.

“To see another young girl perish in that way, we have to do more,” said Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief David Harper, who was at her bedside Wednesday to pray with the family.

“It’s a pretty sad state,” he said. “Winnipeg being the orphanage capital of North America, we have to bring some light into the situation.”

Indigenous leaders have repeatedly called for more on-reserve supports so children can stay close to their communities and culture, but say they haven’t seen enough action in that regard.

Adrian Wyld / The Canadian PressManitoba Grand Chief Derek Nepinak says the girl’s family gathered at the hospital and made the agonizing decision Wednesday to remove her from life support.

“We’ve got to be putting more programs into First Nations, pushing for more recreational activities into First Nations — that’s one way of eliminating these kinds of issues at the reserve level (so) kids can have more of a chance,” Harper said.

He said more needs to be done to support families and get at the “root causes” of strife for aboriginal people, namely caused by the effects of residential schools.

Morgan says the government is focusing many of its efforts on increasing supports for families and that the minister regularly speaks with indigenous leaders about child welfare.

Chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Derek Nepinak said he was also at the hospital with family Wednesday as they decided to take their daughter off life support. He said the family has asked for privacy.

On Friday, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs application process to hire its own Child Advocate will close. That advocate will offer a louder voice for aboriginal child welfare in the province, AMC officials said.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/winnipeg-girl-15-who-was-sexually-attacked-while-in-government-care-removed-from-life-support/feed2stdwinnipeg policeJohn Woods/The Canadian PressAdrian Wyld / The Canadian PressManitoba vows to stop housing foster children in hotels but other provinces engage in same practicehttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-vows-to-stop-housing-foster-children-in-hotels-but-other-provinces-engage-in-same-practice
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/manitoba-vows-to-stop-housing-foster-children-in-hotels-but-other-provinces-engage-in-same-practice#commentsFri, 03 Apr 2015 00:15:47 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=733823

A day after Manitoba said it would abandon the placement of foster children in hotels, several other provinces confirmed they, too, engage in the practice, though it appears to happen with much less frequency.

Those provinces, which include Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador, said such placements are rare and done on an emergency or short-term basis, but child welfare advocates said they shouldn’t happen at all.

Children often enter the system under chaotic circumstances and may need ongoing medical or psychological attention, said Gord Phaneuf, chief executive of the Child Welfare League of Canada.

“When you hear they’re going into a hotel, or a temporary arrangement, it should be a siren call to all of us,” he said. “Children coming into care require placements with caregivers who are trained, supported, and who provide safe protection, nurturing and consistency.”

In a tearful news conference this week, Manitoba’s family services minister vowed to end all hotel placements by June 1. Kerri Irvin-Ross made the declaration after a teenaged girl, who had been placed in a downtown Winnipeg hotel, was viciously assaulted outside the hotel.

FacebookTina Fontaine

The minister had committed to moving away from so-called last-resort hotel placements last fall after another teenaged girl, Tina Fontaine, was killed after running away from the hotel where she was placed.

The province, which has about 10,000 mostly aboriginal foster children, is now “accelerating” efforts to expand spaces in group homes and shelters and to recruit more foster parents, especially those willing to take on runaways and children with special needs, said Rachel Morgan, a government spokeswoman.

Ms. Morgan said the province had stopped a few months ago using contract workers to supervise children placed in hotels in favour of provincial staff. But “obviously that wasn’t enough,” she said, referring to this week’s assault.

In the past year, the province has placed about 350 children in hotels. As of Wednesday, there were still nine children in hotels. “The solution is not to put them in hotels and get them away from downtown,” she said.

He said he was surprised to learn the province’s ministry of children and youth services wasn’t keeping track. When he queried all 48 children’s aid societies, about half responded. Some confirmed it happens but only rarely, and typically involves children 16 or older. Only one society told him that it forbids the practice, he said.

“My biggest concern is those that didn’t respond and the fact the government didn’t know,” he said.

‘When you hear they’re going into a hotel, or a temporary arrangement, it should be a siren call to all of us’

The ministry was unable to say Thursday how often hotel placements occur. In a statement, spokeswoman Anne Machowski said children in the government’s care must be housed in safe places and hotels are not specifically mentioned in the Child and Family Services Act as being among them.

“However, that does not preclude a ministry director or a local director of a (children’s aid society) from designating a hotel a place of safety,” she said.

Mr. Elman said he plans to raise the issues of hotel placements and over-representation of aboriginal children in foster care at the next meeting of the Canadian Council of Child and Youth Advocates. Some estimates suggest that 40 per cent of children nationwide in foster care are aboriginal; Manitoba cites a figure of 80 per cent.

Since B.C. started tracking hotel stays last November, there have been eight short-term placements, spokesman Sheldon Johnson said Thursday. He said the province strives to minimize the movement of children and such stays only happen between or prior to placement in foster homes.

CBC News reported last month that New Brunswick placed children as young as 11 in hotels on 13 occasions between November 2012 and November 2014. The stays lasted from a few hours to a few weeks and the children were supervised by contract workers.

Newfoundland said there have been fewer than five short-term, emergency hotel placements in the last two years and the province has intensified recruitment of foster parents and awarded new contracts to group homes for children with complex needs.

Saskatchewan said it has used hotels on two occasions in the last year: one was an overnight stay for three siblings awaiting placement, and the other was for four days for two youths who were displaced because of a fire at a group home.

Alberta was the only province reached Thursday that said it did not place children in hotels. “For a number of years the policy of this government is that we don’t put children in care into hotel or motel rooms,” spokeswoman Trish Filevich said.

A report last October by the Child Welfare League said the foster care system exists in a “state of crisis,” and that only a “relatively small proportion of foster parents provide the vast majority of care.”

Sheila Durnford, president of the Canadian Foster Family Association, said one common complaint is lack of funding by provinces for foster parents caring for children with special needs. The best recruitment tool is word of mouth, she said, but “if you have disgruntled foster parents they won’t recruit.”

One positive development in recent years that has eased some pressure in recruiting new foster parents has been a more aggressive push by social workers to find and place children with extended family members, experts said.

Still, there is a need for a national, co-ordinated effort to focus attention on recruitment, retention and ensuring greater diversity among caregivers, Mr. Phaneuf said.

“This isn’t a Rubik’s Cube we can’t solve. The solutions are identified.”

MORDEN, Man. — The world’s largest publicly-displayed mosasaur now has a companion at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre in Morden, Manitoba.

The 13-metre-long marine reptile fossil of “Bruce” has been at the centre since 2003, and on the weekend the centre unveiled a nine-metre-long mosasaur fossil named “Suzy.”

Suzy was found in 1977, not far from the area northwest of Morden where Bruce was discovered in 1974.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Canadian Fossil Discovery CentreThe Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre in Manitoba can now brag that it has the largest mosasaur, shown in a handout photo, on display anywhere in the world.

The executive director of the centre, Peter Cantelon, says it’s awesome to bring the skeletons together after they were apart for anywhere between 40 and 80 million years.

Bruce is officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest mosasaur on public display.

The centre says mosasaurs were fierce predators, and were once the top of the food chain in the Western Interior Seaway that split North America in two.

It says palaeontologists think the mosasaurs’ lineage was branched off from a lizard group known today as the monitor lizards.

SHOAL LAKE, Ont. — More than 30 years have passed, but Janis Redsky can still see the flashing lights of the ambulance she desperately needed.

She was pregnant and crippled by searing abdominal pains, stranded on her reserve Shoal Lake 40 — an island carved off a century ago for construction of an aqueduct to provide water to the city of Winnipeg.

The ambulance sat on the opposite shore, less than a kilometre away, as Redsky and her husband tried to find a way across.

“All we could do was look at the ambulance — a physical view of help waiting across the water,” recalls her husband, Stewart, breaking down into tears.

After an hour, Redsky watched it turn around and drive away. It would be another two hours before Redsky made it to a hospital in Kenora, Ont.

By then, she had lost the baby. She needed to be revived on the operating table and spent 10 days in hospital. She is unable to have any more children.

“I love children. We did lots of fostering but it’s not the same,” said Redsky, who is a daycare teacher.

“It still traumatizes me to this day,” says her husband. I always wonder if we had help immediately, if those three hours would have made a difference.”

Redsky’s ancestors lived on the shores of Shoal Lake along the Manitoba-Ontario boundary at the turn of the last century when a delegation from Winnipeg came looking for a fresh-water source for the Manitoba capital some 140 kilometres away.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John WoodsStewart Redsky, former chief and current Alcohol/Drug Counsellor of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, sits in the community's water storage room and talks about water and access issues in his community Wednesday, February 25, 2015.

News reports from the time noted the delegation believed the spot was largely uninhabited, “with the exception of a few Indians.”

Heavy equipment moved in and Shoal Lake residents moved out, on to a peninsula across the bay. That land became an island when crews cut a channel to divert tannin-laden, boggy water coming from Falcon Lake away from the aqueduct intake for Winnipeg.

Using gravel carved out from Shoal Lake’s ancestral land, crews built a dam to ensure Winnipeg’s water remained untainted. On one side, contaminated water flows to the residents of Shoal Lake 40 reserve. On the other side, clean water flows to Winnipeg.

A running water system was built for Shoal Lake 40 in the 1990s but it did not meet standards and there was a cryptosporidiosis outbreak in 1997. For 17 years, its 270 residents have remained under a boil water advisory, the second longest-running advisory of its type, according to Health Canada.

The band believes having an all-weather road is key to solving its water problems, as supplies could be trucked in to build a treatment plant at a reasonable price.

“Having a road means a water treatment plant. It means an economy, it means survival as a community,” said Cuyler Cotton, a policy analyst with the First Nation.

But the problems with a lack of a road run deeper than clean water.

Every year, people in Shoal Lake 40 fall through the ice trying to get into the community. In Redsky’s case, emergency medical help was delayed.

“People have died in that water,” Cotton says.

A century later, residents are still waiting for a historic wrong to be set right.

The community estimates an all-weather road would cost about $30 million. The federal government, Manitoba and the city of Winnipeg have all chipped in $1 million each for a feasibility study, but there are no firm commitments beyond that.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John WoodsAshley Green, a resident of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, carries a 20-litre water container into his home Wednesday, February 25, 2015.

Residents have dubbed it Freedom Road. It’s already been carved out of the wilderness and is used, with caution, when frozen during the winter. In spring and summer, however, it is an impassable muddy mess.

Stewart Redsky says he has been lobbying for Freedom Road for so long that his family calls him a “broken record.”

“It’s tough with the community being in a state of hopelessness,” he says.It’s a challenge to live and survive each and every day.”

Next year, Linda Redsky’s foster son will have to leave the reserve to attend high school. Without year-round access to the reserve, he will have to board in Kenora.

At least he will have access to clean water, she says. He suffers from severe eczema and other skin conditions. The reserve spends $100,000 a year on bottled water to drink, but people still bathe and do laundry in the untreated water. When she runs a bath, Redsky covers up the faucet with a facecloth so the tub doesn’t fill up with debris.

“You feel angry when you think about it,” says Redsky, who has fallen through the ice twice trying to get home.We’re living in these conditions because of something that we didn’t do.”

One of the first things Kevin Chief did when he was appointed Manitoba’s minister responsible for Winnipeg was visit Shoal Lake 40. The community has been through feasibility studies before but Chief, says it’s different this time.

“We would not commit $1 million if we were not serious and committed to getting this road completed,” says Chief.It’s a priority for me, it’s a priority for my government.”

Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman says the city has committed $4 million to Shoal Lake 40’s Freedom Road but stopped short of committing cash. Winnipeg wants to be a “responsible partner” with the First Nation, he says.

“These are complex issues and it involves Winnipeg’s water supply,” Bowman said. It’s also imperative that the government of Canada step up to contribute to the health and accessibility of the First Nation.”

Manitoba’s New Democratic Party has learned a lesson familiar to all good revolutionaries: If you’re going to kill the king, you’d better finish the job — or risk becoming the next victim.

Five members of Premier Greg Selinger’s cabinet are now painfully aware of that reality. Having resigned their posts in a challenge to Mr. Selinger’s leadership, they find themselves relegated to the sidelines following a weekend convention at which Mr. Selinger narrowly succeeded in hanging onto his job.

Mr. Selinger won the support of 759 delegates of a possible 1,490 in a dramatic vote in Winnipeg. That placed him first among three candidates, enabling him — unless another revolt materializes — to finish out the term to which the party was elected in 2011.

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While no doubt satisfying to Mr. Selinger, his victory could hardly be called a triumph and may ultimately prove fatal to his government’s future. It took two ballots to settle the contest after five months of intense campaigning, and Mr. Selinger drew just 33 more votes than runner-up Theresa Oswald. That means he holds onto his office with the support of just 50.9% of party representatives.

If his own party is divided over his leadership, Manitobans as a whole are less ambivalent. The revolt against him arose when the party’s popularity sank to such rock-bottom levels that his caucus and even his cabinet feared they could not win the next election under his leadership. Although Mr. Selinger led the party to a record victory in 2011, public support plummeted after he increased the provincial sales tax, breaking a clear campaign pledge.

While it is not unheard of for caucus members to grumble when they sense their future is in doubt, it is rare for a cabinet to openly challenge the leader. Yet the defectors in Mr. Selinger’s case included his ministers of finance, health and justice. He will now have to replace them from among a caucus that threw much of its support to his two challengers.

His return as premier should do little to counter the impression the NDP is a sharply divided party, with limited faith in its own future. Two hundred delegates sat out the second round rather than choose between the two remaining contenders. In squeaking through, Mr. Selinger incurred a major debt to the province’s union leaders whose support put him over the top.

The result also puts the NDP dangerously at odds with public sentiment, by sticking with the man who broke a major election promise and then refused to respect the backlash it produced. The party has now officially endorsed not only the tax increase, but the breach of trust that enabled it. You can’t get much haughtier than that.

Mr. Selinger chose to mark his victory by once again defying the obvious, claiming things have never been better. “Our party is stronger now,” he declared. “We have more members, our finances are in decent shape … we’ve connected with Manitobans on their values. That’s a formula for success.”

It’s a curious way to measure success: hanging onto a job by your fingernails in the face of massive opposition by the people closest to you. Mr. Selinger has a little over a year to win back support from a public that knows his promises can’t be trusted and his party doesn’t really want him around. He may wish to keep the victory celebrations short.

Greg Selinger maintained the title of Manitoba premier on Sunday, but his narrow victory may do little to assuage concerns about the provincial NDP’s inner turmoil as the province nears an election.

The beleaguered premier won a leadership contest by only 33 votes on the second ballot on Sunday, securing victory over Theresa Oswald by little more than a rounding error. Ms. Oswald was one of the “Gang of Five” — a group of ministers who publicly resigned from Mr. Selinger’s cabinet late last year in a bid to force the premier to step down.

Moments after the results were announced, Mr. Selinger took to the stage, stating that the party remains united.

“It’s been a long journey, but we’ve also gotten to know each other better,” he told cheering supporters.

We’ve made friendships. We’ve had a few bumps and grinds along the way, too. But we’re a community — we’re a community of social democrats. We’re a community of people dedicated to serving the people of Manitoba

“We’ve made friendships. We’ve had a few bumps and grinds along the way, too. But we’re a community — we’re a community of social democrats. We’re a community of people dedicated to serving the people of Manitoba.”

The first ballot, held Sunday morning, included candidate Steve Ashton, who failed to secure the leadership over Mr. Selinger back in 2009.

During that round, 1,699 NDP delegates cast a vote. Mr. Selinger won only 612 of those ballots, leading the pack but not securing enough to secure the 50%-plus-one majority required to win on the first round.

Mr. Ashton was dropped from the ballot, and delegates were left to choose between Mr. Selinger and Ms. Oswald. Only 1,490 delegates cast a vote on the second round. Mr. Selinger won 759 votes to Ms. Oswald’s 726. Five ballots were spoiled.

“It was a very close race, obviously, and in a general sense it hardly gives Selinger the tremendous legitimacy that he expected,” said Allen Mills, a political science professor at the University of Winnipeg.

“Since he’s won, he’s vindicated. Of course he’s now stuck with all the same problems.”

The premier has faced catastrophic poll numbers since he raised the province’s PST by a point to 8% in 2013, despite explicitly promising the tax would remain untouched. Mr. Selinger spent the last four months on the brink, when he responded to a caucus revolt by announcing plans for a leadership race that would include himself.

Mr. Mills said the internal bickering and subsequent leadership turmoil has done nothing to boost the NDP’s brand.

The party is the second longest-serving government in Canada. The NDP has held power since 1999; Mr. Selinger took the helm from Gary Doer in 2011.

“Right now, if you were betting, you would bet that the NDP is not going to win the next general election. But never say never in politics, there is a year before the next election and lots of things can happen,” Mr. Mills said.

Paul Thomas, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Manitoba, said Mr. Selinger has not been left with a strong mandate.

“Part of Mr. Pallister’s attack will be to say here is a premier who is not even trusted by his most senior political colleagues in cabinet and caucus,” Mr. Thomas said. “With rank-and-file members, he could only get a little over 50% of the vote in a leadership convention.”

Ms. Oswald, a former teacher, had told delegates Conservative voters could be persuaded to vote NDP under a new leader.

The runner-up, who recently said she had “grave concerns” about Mr. Selinger’s leadership, declined to tell reporters after the vote whether she would run in the next election or sit in cabinet again.

“If that hand is extended, I’ve made a promise to New Democrats across this province that I will do my best and work together and that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” she said.

“I believe I did the very best I could and it didn’t go my way today. But I promised the members I’m going to work hard.”

It’s been a political drama marked by betrayal, bravado and vulnerable legacies. But the race to succeed Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger — called by the leader himself in a bid to stave off the growing chorus of dissent that originated in his own cabinet — is expected to end on Sunday.

Mr. Selinger is facing off against two former cabinet ministers: Theresa Oswald and Steve Ashton. Ms. Oswald was a member of the infamous Gang of Five, one of a handful of cabinet ministers who resigned en masse late last year in a desperate bid to push Mr. Selinger out of the premier’s chair as flagging opinion polls suggested the ruling NDP would face near-annihilation in an election.

Each of the contenders is claiming strong support going into the first ballot; but as with any delegate contest, the outcome is almost impossible to predict and entirely dependent on who shows up to cast a vote.

“I’m really reluctant to make any predictions about what’s going to happen on Sunday,” said Hugh McFadyen who served as leader of the opposition in Manitoba while heading the Progressive Conservative party; he resigned in 2011 and now serves as a principal at the public relations firm DFH Public Affairs in Calgary.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John WoodsGreg Selinger, centre, who was voted leader of the Manitoba provincial NDP and premier of Manitoba raises his arms in victory with his opponent Steve Ashton at the leadership convention in Winnipeg on October 17, 2009.

In advanced support, Mr. Ashton leads with the largest number of constituency delegates, but Mr. Selinger has accrued the largest share of allocated votes from large unions.

“There’s no ability to independently verify delegate numbers. You don’t know the number of delegates who are going to show up and how they’re going to vote.”

No one seems confident about who will emerge in the lead after the first ballot, but Mr. McFadyen said that if a second vote has to be called, the result could be anybody’s guess.

What is clear is that it will be the culmination of a long, fraught term of distrust and discord.

In the top job since 2009, Mr. Selinger’s reign began to spiral out of control in 2013 after he backtracked on earlier promises by raising the Retail Sales Tax a percentage point, to 8%.

Within months, his popularity plummeted to such a degree that NDP MLAs began to fear a catastrophic loss in the next provincial election — scheduled for April 2016. The NDP has governed Manitoba since 1999; for the party to lose its only remaining hold on leadership at the provincial level was an unbearable proposition.

“The issue was really polling,” Mr. McFadyen said. “They had a consistent run of polls saying they were in serious trouble. As a result of that, they reacted in the way that governing parties often do, they decided the leader had to go in order to save the organization.”

But when pressure was applied, Mr. Selinger declined to fold.

Finally, the caucus broke into an unprecedented revolt. Five of Mr. Selinger’s key cabinet ministers resigned, accusing the premier of being grasping and uncommunicative.

“For some time, it has been increasingly difficult to do our jobs because the premier has stopped listening to our advice,” their open resignation letter read. “In recent weeks and months, it has become clear to us that he is increasingly being driven by his desire to hold onto his leadership rather than by the best interests of Manitobans.”

It was a blow for Mr. Selinger; more than that, it was a bizarre turn of events in Canadian political history. It’s not uncommon for a premier to find himself — or herself — facing a caucus revolt. But it’s unheard of for a gang of cabinet ministers to be leading the charge.

“It wasn’t just any five ministers,” Mr. McFadyen added. “It was easily the five most important and talented ministers in the government. These were five ministers who really mattered and for that to happen — and for a leader to not step down — is really exceptional.”

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Steve LambertFormer Manitoba health minister Theresa Oswald is surrounded by supporters as she officially launches her campaign for the NDP leadership in Winnipeg on Dec. 21, 2014.

Royce Koop, a political science professor at the University of Manitoba, said it’s unheard of for a premier to try to duke it out in the face of such flagging caucus support.

“I walked by [Ms. Oswald’s] riding office. She was outside the day he announced he wouldn’t resign and she was pretty shell shocked. I think it took that whole group a little while to recover and to realize the situation that they were in,” Mr. Koop said.

Mr. Selinger also declined to subject his leadership to a review, which traditionally requires a high bar of support to pass. Instead, he declared a full-on leadership race.

“In the future, people like you and I are going to ask if this was a smart move on his part. It was certainly a daring move.”

The leadership race took the focus off the premier and placed it instead on his potential successors.

From the mire, Mr. Ashton and Ms. Oswald emerged. But Mr. McFadyen suggests the latter has been hampered by her recent history. Ms. Oswald was castigated as the leader of the Gang of Five — and, thus, disloyal.

All of this may have created a spot for Mr. Ashton to emerge as a compromise candidate.

“The level of animosity between the Oswald and Selinger camps have led to dynamics that allows Steve Ashton to go around, organize and deliver a message that he’s not responsible for the party’s current showing in the polls. He also wasn’t disloyal to the leader in the way Oswald was,” Mr. McFadyen said.

That gives Mr. Ashton the stronger narrative. Whether it’s enough to topple Mr. Selinger will be revealed on Sunday.

Objection!Richard Martineau returns from a theme park vacation in Florida appalled that there were even more people wearing niqabs than there were morbidly obese people riding mobility scooters. And he’s even more appalled that his delusional fellow theme park patrons didn’t even seem outraged by the niqabis presence. No yelling, no pointing and gawping, no throwing funnel cakes — people just went about their bloody business! It’s the exact same thing as if a bunch of black people were walking around in shackles, Martineau argues in Le Journal de Montréal, and proof that if we turn a blind eye to these people and their capes society will soon collapse into some kind of Islamist nightmare. Just like in, uh, Florida? We might have to read that again…

Talking of Muslims, Haroon Siddiqui, writing in the Toronto Star, understandably objects to a Senator at committee demanding a Muslim witness from Winnipeg “answer” for ISIS atrocities. It is true, as Senator Lynn Beyak said, that “if 21 Christians were beheaded by Jews, they would be called ‘radical extremist Jews.’ And if pilots were burned in cages by a Christian, they would be called ‘radical violent Christians.’” It does not follow that moderate Jews and Christians would then have any obligation to apologize or explain or disavow.

The Edmonton Journal‘s Paula Simons is not impressed with the Conservatives’ “melodramatics” over the ostensible threat al-Shabaab poses to her city’s monstrous mall. She says their Facebook petition-signing and fundraising pitches “exaggerate the risk and play into the hands of radical extremists,” and she’s quite right. Indeed, she says, the government is pretty much doing “al-Shabaab’s work for it.”

“But hey, who cares if Edmonton merchants lose business or Muslim-Canadians are marginalized, or other Canadians are scared witless?” Simons fumes. “There’s an election to be won.”

Aaron Wherry of Maclean’s observes that there seems to be significant confusion among the Conservatives as to what politicians are good for. Overseeing the operations of CSIS? Certainly not. That’s for judges. Overseeing the operations of, like, everything else the government does, including whether people sentenced to life imprisonment ever get out of jail? Why, that’s perfectly within the realm of politics.

It’s almost as if they’re making it up as they go along!

On the bright side for civil libertarians, Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne observes, the Tories’ new legislation to make a life sentence “mean life” would not quite accomplish that. “It would mean life or the readiness of an elected politician to personally authorize the release of one of Canada’s ‘most heinous criminals'” — said heinous criminal having appealed to Cabinet — which of course would never happen, which is of course the point. So, yeah, there’s no bright side for civil libertarians. Coyne does not seem perplexed by the notion of “a wave of elderly jailbirds … released on parole,” and as such sees no justification for this move at all — and some potential drawbacks, too, such as giving violent prisoners less incentive for good behaviour.

Tasha Kheiriddin, writing in the National Post, thinks the Conservatives have the big-time “wedge issue” they need in “life means life,” inasmuch as “it’s hard to imagine NDP leader Thomas Mulcair or Liberal leader Justin Trudeau going to bat” for any of the real or hypothetical criminals in question. Well, it’d be a pretty poor wedge issue if everyone agreed, wouldn’t it? In fact we look forward to both leaders, especially Mulcair, taking on this policy. Frankly if you’re a centre-left party leader and you can’t mount such an argument, you have no business being where you are.

The Star‘s inimitable Bob Hepburn thinks it’s time to carve the queen out of Canada’s citizenship oath, mostly on account of she’s “foreign,” which she isn’t. He thinks that we would somehow “gain … our national-respect” by taking Australia’s Queen-free oath and “just replacing the name ‘Australia’ with ‘Canada.'”

In the Post, Stéphane Dion explains the very good reasons why he voted against the Reform Act, and John Peppall explains why the Reform Act as passed by the House simply doesn’t make any logical sense at all — chiefly inasmuch as it formalizes the power of MPs to decide a leader is unfit to lead them, but not to decide who’s fit to lead them in the first place.

“New Democrats are unlikely to be entertained by the way their only government in the country is tearing itself apart,” the Globe‘s Adam Radwanski reports from Manitoba. But for the rest of us … wheeeee!

The two accused had spent the day drinking and fishing and had only stopped to relieve themselves when they encountered the student in the bush.

He didn’t know any of that and spent hours hiding until he finally flagged down a vehicle on the highway around 5 a.m.

Police quickly identified the two accused, who were well-known in the area for their drunken antics, and arrested them.

“It was out of character, it was taking a joke too far,” Gratton told court.

Shindruk spent six months in custody before he was granted bail and sentenced to time served. He was fined $3,000 and put on probation for two years.

Gratton spent about a month behind bars and was given two years of probation.

“What happened on this particular night was inexcusable and regrettable,” said defence lawyer Darren Sawchuk.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/pair-say-drunken-stupidity-to-blame-for-scare-that-sent-manitoba-student-fleeing-through-forest/feed0stdOld forest with moss covered trees and rays of sunFather of four boys who died in Manitoba fire came home to burning house but couldn’t stop tragedyhttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/father-of-four-boys-who-died-in-manitoba-fire-arrived-home-to-burning-house-but-could-not-stop-tragedy
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/father-of-four-boys-who-died-in-manitoba-fire-arrived-home-to-burning-house-but-could-not-stop-tragedy#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 03:07:28 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=707161

KANE, Man. — The day after the fire that killed four boys, almost nothing remained of the two-storey house that was once home to two parents and their eight children.

All that could be seen Wednesday from the nearest rural highway was charred rubble and smoke, a fire truck, heavy equipment, a shed and a grove of pine trees that had been left untouched by the flames.

Only hours before, the scene at this normally quiet farmhouse, located about an hour southwest of Winnipeg, had been quite different.

Fire officials said Jake Froese, the children’s father, arrived home from work with his eldest son, Steven, just after midnight. They found smoke streaming from the windows and called for emergency help.

About 20 volunteer fighters from nearby communities rushed to the property near Kane, Man., soon afterward, but the building was engulfed in flames and too hot to enter.

“They went into a defensive strategy and they could not make entrance into the house, due to heavy smoke and fire conditions,” said Bernard Schellenberg, the local fire chief.

The children of Doralee Eberhardt and Jake Froese were between the ages of two and 18, the Winnipeg Free Press reported.

The three youngest were able to flee the flames with their mother. Four boys, aged nine to 15, were sleeping on the upper floor and were unable to escape in time.

Officials have confirmed Bobby, Timmy, Danny and Henry Froese died in the blaze.

Their parents are in hospital recovering from smoke inhalation; the remaining three children — two girls and a toddler boy — are staying with a neighbour.

“My son played basketball with one of their kids,” said one neighbour. “It’s a tragedy. We’re praying for them.”

Beverley Eberhardt, Ms. Eberhardt’s mother, said Jake and Steven Froese had been working the late shift at a local manufacturing plant. By the time they arrived at the house, the fire had taken hold and flames were shooting out of the windows.

Jake Froese tried to climb into the house, using a ladder, but was beaten back by the heat and smoke.

“[Jake] tried to get them out. He was going through the window but he couldn’t wake them. The smoke and flames blew him right down,” the grandmother said.

Ms. Eberhardt said the father remained in hospital and she did not know how he was doing.

Doralee appeared to be better physical shape, she said, adding, “But mentally she isn’t good.”

As in many rural areas, the district relies on volunteers to fight fires.

“The home is destroyed and the family is obviously devastated,” said Ralph Groening, the reeve of nearby Morris, who added the children went to school in nearby Lowe Farm.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Trevor HaganResponders and investigators at the scene of a fatal house fire near the rural community of Kane, Manitoba, Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015.

Grief counsellors have been brought in to help students at the tight-knit school.

Mr. Groening described the Froese home as “a 70- to 80-year-old farmhouse. Regionally, it is now identified here as a local rural residential property. The residents worked in the local community, so it’s not a farm.”

He added this is one of the worst tragedies his community has ever witnessed.

There is no suspicion of foul play. Mr. Groening said the fire chief is still looking into the cause, but expects it may have been an electrical accident. Temperatures were as low as -27C Wednesday night.

National Post, with files from The Canadian Press

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/father-of-four-boys-who-died-in-manitoba-fire-arrived-home-to-burning-house-but-could-not-stop-tragedy/feed1stdfire-1manitoba-fire-morrisTHE CANADIAN PRESS/Trevor HaganFour children killed in Manitoba fire: ‘The home is destroyed and the family is obviously devastated’http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/children-among-dead-in-fire-at-rural-manitoba-farmhouse-town-reeve-says
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/children-among-dead-in-fire-at-rural-manitoba-farmhouse-town-reeve-says#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 16:19:49 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=706671

A tight-knit rural community south of Winnipeg is grieving the loss of four children who died in a rural house fire in a small community located about an hour’s drive southeast of Winnipeg.

The farm house was home to a family of two adults and seven children. Four of those children have died, three are staying with neighbours, and two parents have been taken to hospital, according to Bernard Schellenberg, the local fire chief.

His team responded to the call in Kane, Man.

The two-storey farmhouse in the municipality of Morris was engulfed in flames by the time firefighters reached the scene. Crews couldn’t enter the home as it was burning so hot.

“The home is destroyed and the family is obviously devastated,” said according to Morris Reeve Ralph Groening.

“We’re waiting for someone to confirm the number of fatalities. We’re very careful. It is more than one, we just want to be cautious.”

Mr. Groening said that with a family of this size, he expected some of the victims would include children.

The home is destroyed and the family is obviously devastated

Office of Fire Commissioner confirming loss of 4 lives in tragic house fire in RM of Morris near village of Kane. #rmofmorris

“The history of it is it’s a 70 to 80-year-old farm house. Regionally, it is now identified here as a local rural residential property,” he said. “The residents worked in the local community, so it’s not a farm.”

The property was located a short distance from the village of Kane, which comprises about 10 homes.

The nearest neighbour was about a kilometre away, Mr. Groening said.

The children attended school in Lowe Farm, Man. The Reeve said teams had been sent out to prepare potential schoolmates.

DAUPHIN, Man. — Two Manitoba brothers have been jailed for 16 months for what a judge called a “relentless attack” of cyberbullying and sexual exploitation designed to “exploit, demean and humiliate” a 14-year-old girl.

Judge Donald Slough said a friend of the brothers met the victim on Facebook a year ago. In his written sentence released Thursday, the judge said the man told her to send him nude pictures or “he would do something to her.”

When she sent him a picture of her exposed breasts, the man demanded she send more explicit pictures or he would send her nude picture to everyone in the community. She complied.

The brothers, who were 17 at the time and cannot be named, found out about the pictures and started harassing the girl, Judge Slough said.

“The communication was intense and relentless, occurring both day and night,” he wrote. “The accused, acting in tandem, alternatively flattered and abused the victim, demanding progressively more explicit images; instructing the victim as to what sexual acts she was to perform and digitally record.”

‘Ten months after being victimized, she is still frightened and demonstrating symptoms of extreme anxiety’

The brothers distributed the photos through social media The victim’s parents discovered the abuse after noticing a change in their daughter’s behaviour and went to police in January.

The brothers were arrested in May and pleaded guilty to four charges, including sexual touching and possession and distribution of child pornography.

Both have expressed “rather limited” remorse, Judge Slough wrote. One brother said tormenting the victim was “fun but now feels it was stupid.”

The judge said the impact on the 14-year-old has been “devastating and long-lasting.” The girl went “from being happy to being deeply troubled.”

“Ten months after being victimized, she is still frightened and demonstrating symptoms of extreme anxiety,” he wrote.

“Her reputation in the community has been damaged and she has been ridiculed at school. Given the difficulty in controlling the use of images once they enter cyberspace, the harmful impact on the victim may well be long term.”

Experts say this kind of “sextortion” is becoming more common. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection recently warned it is seeing an alarming increase in the number of teens who are sharing sexual images of themselves, then being extorted, sometimes for money.

Signy Arnason, associate director at the centre, said this case is one of the more severe because of the age and tactics of the perpetrators.

“It’s quite an extreme case when you’re talking about youth engaged in this behaviour,” she said. “It’s deeply troubling.”

The parents of Amanda Todd, a 15-year-old in British Columbia, say she committed suicide in 2012 after being extorted for two years. She exposed herself while on a web chat and the image was used to blackmail her into putting on another “show” online.

She eventually posted a heartbreaking, nine-minute video online detailing her torment before she killed herself.

The suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, another cyberbullied teenager in Nova Scotia in 2013, turned a spotlight on the issue. Her parents established an organization, the Rehtaeh Parsons Society, to address the prevalence of cyberbullying, youth sexual violence and the distribution of images among young people.

Jail sentences for those found guilty of such offences is a good deterrence, Ms. Arnason said. But she added parents need to talk to their children about sexual exploitation online.

Children need to feel comfortable coming to their parents when they run into trouble because complying with threats from tormentors rarely puts an end to the bullying, she said.

“It’s very, very challenging to stay on top of what kids are doing. You’ve got to keep those lines of communication open.”

Some leaders just don’t know when it’s time to quit. Such is the case with Greg Selinger, the beleaguered NDP premier of Manitoba.

Last week, five of Selinger’s key cabinet ministers, as well as several other members of his caucus, urged him to resign for the sake of the party. When the premier refused, the five ministers stated in their resignation letter that Selinger “is increasingly being driven by his desire to hold onto his leadership rather than by the best interests of Manitobans.”

This mini-revolt was triggered by a spate of polls that have the Manitoba NDP trailing far behind the provincial Progressive Conservatives in advance of the next election (which will take place in late 2015 or early 2016). The tipping point was the overwhelming defeat of Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the NDP-affiliated candidate in the Winnipeg mayoralty election of Oct. 22. But Selinger’s political headache mostly comes down to one thing and one thing only: a broken promise.

The clip on YouTube from a September 2011 CTV interview during the last provincial election campaign is only 12 seconds long, but the words definitely resonate. (You can watch it by Googling the quoted phrase, “Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger promises not to raise the PST.”) “It is a ridiculous idea that we are going to raise the sales tax. That’s total nonsense. Everybody knows that,” Selinger firmly declares.

Right. Manitobans now know it wasn’t quite so ridiculous an idea after all. In April 2013, Selinger and then Finance Minister Stan Struthers tried to justify and spin a one percentage point increase in the provincial sales tax — from seven to eight percent — as essential for their budget. That rationale notwithstanding, there was no getting away from the fact that it was a broken promise, pure and simple.

Ironically, Struthers, who devised the PST plan, is one of the five cabinet ministers resigning — allegedly because Selinger will no longer take his advice. In many ways, his political chutzpah in trying to pretend he had nothing to do with the tax bump is worse than the premier’s.

Why do politicians break promises so often? For the same reason, as the CBC writer Martin O’Malley has put it, that the student in your Grade 9 class running for school president promised to abolish homework if elected. It is a curious combination of genuine sincerity and a desire to tell prospective voters what they want to hear and what you know will get you elected.

Or sometimes, it’s spontaneous: On the campaign trail and in the heat of the moment, with an enthusiastic crowd demanding to hear something positive, human nature takes over.

Related

In the case of the Liberal Party Red Book published prior to the 1993 federal election, a pledge was given in writing that the GST would be eliminated. “A Liberal government will replace the GST with a system that generates equivalent revenues, is fairer to consumers and to small business, minimizes disruption to small business, and promotes federal-provincial fiscal cooperation and harmonization,” the Red Book declared.

That was interpreted to mean that a Liberal administration led by Jean Chrétien would “scrap” the detested tax outright. Yet Jean Chrétien later remembered it slightly differently in his memoirs. “What we were promising to do was clear enough in my own mind —replace, not abolish the GST — but I made a mistake by trying to be a bit too clever with the nuanced argument,” he wrote. “My party and I certainly paid a political price in terms of our credibility by creating the impression in the minds of many voters that we were promising to get rid of the sales tax even [if] we couldn’t find an alternative system.”

That was certainly the interpretation Liberal MP Sheila Copps offered when she vowed during a CBC “town hall” broadcast that if the GST was not abolished she would resign her seat. Chrétien called it a “gusty,” though “imprudent” act.

Three years later, when it was clear that the Liberals were never going to abolish the tax or replace it, Copps honoured her pledge. She resigned and ran in a by-election against 12 opponents. Voters in her Hamilton riding admired her honesty and political courage. While the margin of the vote she received declined from 67% in 1993 to 46%, she retained her seat. Chrétien then declared her “a great politician” and she soon re-entered the Liberal cabinet.

(Chrétien was less impressed with Liberal MP John Nunziata, who dared to vote against his party’s budget because it had backtracked on the GST promise. For his transgression, Nunziata was expelled from the Liberal caucus.)

Since then, the Internet and social media have made it more difficult for politicians to shovel their reneged promises under a rug. Type in “Obama broken promises” into Google and thousands of websites appear tracking every promise the U.S. president has broken dating back seemingly to when he was in high school. The Tampa Bay Times even has something it calls an “Obameter,” with pages of listed promises the President has made and allegedly broken. (Obama can always blame a stubborn Republican-led Congress for his difficulties, a luxury Canadian prime ministers and premiers do not have.)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been accused by opposition parties of breaking upwards of approximately 150 promises since taking power (depending on how you define “promise” and “breaking”). The most blatant one was a 2006 election campaign pledge that a Conservative government would “preserve income trusts by not imposing any new taxes on them.” Yet nine months later, the late finance minister Jim Flaherty did just that. Indeed, he forthrightly (and admirably) admitted that he was reneging on a promise.

For the past year and a half, Selinger believed that the public’s anger would subside and Manitobans would grudgingly accept the 1% bump in the PST

He claimed that too many corporations were using income trusts to avoid paying taxes, and that the government could not continue to permit that. That was a defence that many Canadians — no fans of big, wealthy corporations — could appreciate, despite the fact that many seniors also were hurt by this about-face. Yet the political fallout in the next election two and half years later was negligible.

Manitoba PC leader Brian Pallister has kept the PST decision front and centre, going so far as to challenge the decision in court because the NDP raised the tax without first holding a required referendum. That ploy failed, but the strategy was effective in publicizing the NDP’s backtracking.

For the past year and a half, Selinger believed that the public’s anger would subside and Manitobans would grudgingly accept the 1% bump in the PST, as they have every other tax increase foisted upon them since 1916.

And it is true that Manitobans are a forgiving lot. “Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken,” the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift once noted.

Not this time, however. In Manitoba right now, many politicians and voters alike appear to have had their fill of broken promises.

National Post

Historian and writer Allan Levine’s most recent book is, Toronto: Biography of a City.

When was the last time a cabinet minister resigned in Canada? I mean on principle, not because he was caught in some scandal or other. Okay: when was the last time five did?

You have to go back to the 1984 crack-up of the Parti Québécois government, when half a dozen ministers resigned in protest at Rene Levesque’s post-referendum soft-pedalling of separation, to find as spectacular an explosion as that which has just torn apart the NDP government of Manitoba.

It isn’t just the number of ministers involved. We’re talking about the heart of the lineup: the Finance minister, the Justice minister, the Health minister, the Jobs and Economy minister, and the Municipal Government (and former Finance) minister. All gone, in a single day, unwilling to work under the premier, Greg Selinger, any longer.

It doesn’t usually come to this. Usually when there is a matter of dispute between ministers, one side or the other gives way, or it is papered over in some fashion. Only rarely does it lead to the kind of open split we’ve seen here. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, when principle is at stake.

In this case the principle is that the government is 15 points behind in the polls. The dissenters have latterly made much of the premier’s supposed “my way or the highway” approach in cabinet (he “stopped listening to our advice” would describe many premiers), but they were quite clear about their motive in the days after the split became public: the party can’t win the next election with him as leader.

There’s no mystery why. While the stolid Selinger, another former Finance minister, has always suffered by comparison with his popular and charismatic predecessor, Gary Doer, he made things infinitely worse for himself last year, when he raised the provincial sales tax a percentage point, having expressly promised not to in the 2011 election.

The broken promise was the more egregious, given the premier had a ready means at hand to let himself out of it: a provincial law requiring a referendum on any tax increase. The government might well have been able to persuade the public to supply it with the extra funds, for flood prevention and other projects, had it bothered to ask them. But that would have been tiresome, so it didn’t, changing the law instead to allow it to proceed without a vote.

Nor, for that matter, did Gordon Campbell, who assured British Columbians before the 2009 provincial election that harmonizing the province’s sales tax with the federal GST was “not on our radar,” only to do so soon after. Nor did Nova Scotia’s Darrell Dexter, who won election in 2009 promising he would neither raise taxes nor cut spending nor run a deficit, then did all three. Maybe the public is growing less tolerant of being lied to. Or maybe you just have to be very good at it.

The Gang of Five, as they’re being called, would be in a stronger position, principle-wise, if they’d resigned the day the tax increase was announced, rather than waiting 18 months to see which way the winds were blowing. Though all of them voted for the bill, some have lately tried to suggest, without quite saying it, that they opposed it privately. How convenient.

Still, it is right that they should resign now rather than, as seemed possible before the weekend, trying to remain in cabinet, even after their public break with the premier. If the premier was not willing to resign himself, they had no alternative but to do so. The idea that they could remain in office, both apart from the government and yet a part of it, supporting these government policies but not those, was simply not on.

The convention of cabinet solidarity is there for a reason: so that governments can be held to account. Otherwise, ministers could forever evade responsibility behind the veil of cabinet secrecy. “Don’t blame me for that disastrous policy or easily foreseen misadventure. I argued against it in cabinet!”

The question is, what happens next. The ministers disavow any intention of bringing Selinger down, but obviously that is now very much in play. Which side can command the confidence of the caucus, and of the broader party? For the moment, the premier has been able to stare down the dissenters. But that hardly settles matters. The party was in low enough popular esteem as it was; in its current state of disarray, it is likely to sink still further. And the further it sinks, the worse the infighting is likely to get, with the premier at the centre of it.

And yet, as we have seen in the past, if a leader is determined to dig in, he is not easily dislodged, even with half or more of his caucus against him. It can be done, as the experiences of Campbell, Alberta’s Alison Redford and Jean Chretien attest. But it is a contest without rules or procedures, a war in the shadows, where no one can be sure who is on which side, or in what numbers, or even what level of support is required, either to defeat the leader or to decisively put down the revolt.

How much better and quicker it would be if caucus had the explicit power to hire and fire the leader, as under a proper Westminster system. Not that changing leaders would necessarily be enough to save this government, now in its 16th year. With Selinger or without him, Manitobans will pass judgment on it soon enough.

WINNIPEG — Five high-profile ministers — more than 25% of the 18-member cabinet — have announced they’re resigning from the cabinet of Manitoba’s NDP government, citing a premier who they say has stopped listening to their advice.

The five front-bench ministers are Finance Minister Jennifer Howard, Justice Minister Andrew Swan, Jobs and Economy Minister Theresa Oswald, Municipal Government Minister Stan Struthers and Health Minister Erin Selby, who all say they will stay on as MLAs.

“It’s clear to me nothing had changed,” Howard told the Winnipeg Free Press. “It’s increasingly difficult for us to be heard. “If you’re in cabinet, you need to be able to speak the truth.”

They say in a statement that it’s become clear to them that Premier Greg Selinger is more interested in hanging on to his leadership than serving the best interests of Manitobans.

A Winnipeg radio station, CJOB, is reporting that Selinger will shuffle his cabinet today.

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In a statement released to the station, Selinger says he’s saddened by the resignations, but notes that he made it clear to his cabinet last week that they must either focus on Manitoba families or step down.

A revolt erupted last week when the ministers suggested Selinger should think about his future, given the NDP’s drop in opinion polls. The New Democrats have trailed the Opposition Progressive Conservatives since the government increased the provincial sales tax to eight per cent from seven last year.

The ministers later agreed to an uneasy truce, with Oswald, Swan and Howard saying they would not resign, although they gave no indication that they were backing down from their suggestions that the premier consider stepping down.

There has also been no indication of when the fall session of the legislature would get underway.